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Drupal 5 vs Drupal 6 module usage

Posted 31st October 2008

When the usage statistics page for Drupal contributions was released recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many people were using the Availability Calendars module, and amazed at the difference the Drupal 6 release had on the usage figures. The graph below shows that the usage was quite steady on the Drupal 5 release, but when the version for Drupal 6 was released, it massively boosted the figures.

So, if you are the maintainer of a Drupal module or theme, and haven't yet released a Drupal 6 version, it looks like you're really missing out on potential users.

Comments

The only usage reporting from D5 are sites running the update_status contrib module. In D6, update.module is in core, so a higher % of D6 sites are checking for updates and therefore providing usage statistics. See http://drupal.org/node/327548 for the effort to clear up the help text on those pages to explain why the numbers lean towards D6.

Thanks for the clarification Derek, that would explain the lower figures for D5. I had wondered if there may be something like that at play. Still, looking forward to seeing the trend hopefully continue upwards for D6.